On Wednesday 4 September 2024 at 22:42 UTC, a carpet-bombing UDP flood targeted a developer platform customer in the Benelux. The attack peaked at 22.9 Gbps and lasted 182 minutes. Traffic originated from 2040 autonomous systems in 107 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | carpet-bombing UDP flood |
| Peak | 22.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 182 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.484 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.017% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.68% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 14 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.